"Look here, Gantry—Elmer. I don't think it looked well, the way you took Miss Bains in the back room at the church and kept her there—must have been half an hour—and when I came in you two jumped and looked guilty."
"Uh-huh, so our little friend Franky is a real rubber-necking old woman!"
It was a spacious dusky cavern under the eaves, the room where they were to stay the night. The pitcher on the black walnut washstand was stippled in gold, riotous with nameless buds. Elmer stood glaring, his big forearms bare and dripping, shaking his fingers over the carpet before he reached for the towel.
"I am not a 'rubber-neck,' and you know it, Gantry. But you're the preacher here, and it's our duty, for the effect on others, to avoid even the appearance of evil."
"Evil to him that evil thinks. Maybe you've heard that, too!"
"Oh, yes, Elmer, I think perhaps I have!"
"Suspicious, dirty-minded Puritan, that's what you are, seeing evil where there ain't any meant."
"People don't hate Puritans because they suspect unjustly, but because they suspect only too darned justly. Look here now, Elmer. I don't want to be disagreeable—"
"Well, you are!"
"—but Miss Bains—she looks sort of cuddlesome and flirtatious, but I'm dead certain she's straight as can be, and I'm not going to stand back and watch you try to, uh, to make love to her."
"Well, smarty, suppose I wanted to marry her?"
"Do you?"
"You know so blame' much, you ought to know without asking!"
"Do you?"
"I haven't said I didn't."
"Your rhetoric is too complicated for me. I'll take it that you do mean to. That's fine! I'll announce your intentions to Deacon Bains."
"You will like hell! Now you look here, Shallard! I'm not going to have you poking your long nose into my business, and that's all there is to it, see?"
"Yes, it would be if you were a layman and I had no official
